BOOKS.
CAPTAIN BURTON'S TRAVELS IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL
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CAPTAIN BURTON'S march of a thousand miles into the heart of Central Africa may well be classed amongst the boldest and most successful-achievements in the annals of inland discovery. Under- taken in the face of the most formidable difficulties, and scantily aided by a Government grant of money, it was accomplished with a steadfast spirit of self-devotion, natural indeed to English hearts of oak, but such as the best of them have never surpassed. Its results, immediate and prospective, are of exceeding value. Captain Burton has settled a cardinal question in African geogra- phy by actual survey of the great central lake, never before visited by Europeans, and whereof there had existed among them for more than three centuries a vague traditionary knowledge, curiously confused by the errors of theoretical conclusion. He has set the first example of successful conflict with the obstacles which narrow trade prejudices have hitherto thrown in the way of free intercourse between Zanzibar and the far interior ; he has shown how the thousand miles of the slave-path may be con- verted into a busy highway for legitimate commerce, and thus he has contributed more than any man of his generation, one alone excepted, to hasten the spontaneous extinction of the slave-trade. The purpose of Captain Burton's expedition, as specified by him in his accepted proposal to the Geographical Society, was primarily to ascertain the limits of the " Sea of 1Jjiji, or Unyamwezi Lake," and secondarily to determine the exportable produce of the interior and the ethnography of its tribes. It was nu part of his design to explore the sources of the White Nile, and he leaves to his sole companion, Captain Speke, the undivided glory, whatever it may be, which is due to his intrepid ipse digit that the Bahr el Abiad issues from a part of Lake Nyanza, which he, Captain Spoke, saw only in imagination, but never with his bodily eyes. What Cap- tain Burton undertook to do, that he did ; and it was a work that demanded both caution and courage, for it was opposed to the prejudices not only of the native tribes,' but of the traders on the coast—Christians, Hindus of Cutch, Arabs, and mongrels. They all dreaded nothing so much as the competition which might result from throwing open the country, not perceiving that the development of its resources would benefit all concerned in its traffic. In 1845, M. Maizan, the first European known to have penetrated beyond the seaboard, was murdered at the insti- gation of this same mercantile community ; and that of Kilwa had, only the year before Captain Burton's arrival, caused the Wangindo savages to murder an Arab merchant who ventured. to lay open the interior. To protect the expedition from a similar fate, it was furnished with a Bale& guard, every man as valiant as Ancient Pistol. A gang of porters and thirty asses were pro- cured to carry baggage and African specie, consisting of cotton, cloth, brass-wire, and beads, of which a total of seventy loads was expended in one year and nine months. The whole retinue, asses and all, behaved according to their nature, that is to say, as badly as possible ; and, during the upward journey, there was not a soul in the caravan, from its half-caste Arab leader to the veriest pauper, that did not desert, or attempt to desert. The journey began from Kaole, a little port on the mainland opposite the island of Zanzibar, nominally on the 27th of June, 1857, but according to African custom it was not until after three starts and little goes on as many successive days that the expedi- tion was definitively on the march. On the 8th of July it entered the Valley of Death and the Home of Hunger—the malarious river plain of the Kingani, where both the Englishmen soon became so weak through sickness that they could hardly stand, and at last were stricken with the fever that, excepting a few intervals of con- valescence, appears to have been their almost constant companion during the remainder of their painful wanderings. In Captain Burton's case this first attack was attended with a curious symp- tom ; he had " during the fever fit, and often for hours afterwards, a queer conviction of divided identity, never ceasing to be two persons that generally thwarted and opposed each other." The maritime region, the first of the five traversed by the expedition, is about 120 miles broad, and terminates at Zungomero, the great centre of trafflo on the Eastern, as are Unyanyembe and Ujiji in the middle and Western regions. " The same attractions which draw caravans to Zungomero render it the great rendezvous of an army of touters, who, whilst watching for the ar- rival of the ivory traders, amuse themselves with plundering the country. The plague has now spread like a flight of locusts over the land. The Wak'hutu, a timid race, who, unlike the Wazaramo, have no sultan to gather round, are being gradually ousted from their ancient seats. In a large village there will seldom be more than three or four families, who oc- cupy the most miserable hovels, all the best having been seized by the touters or pulled down for firewood. These men—slaves, escaped crimmak, and freemen of broken fortunes, flying from misery, punishment, or death on the coast—are armed with muskets and sabres, bows and spears, daggers and knobsticks. They carry ammunition, and thus are too strong for the country people. When rough language and threats fail, the levelled barrel at once establishes the right to a man's house and property, to his wife and children. If money runs short, a village is fired by night, and the people are sold of to the first caravan. In some parts the pattering of musketry is incessant, as it ever was in the turbulent states of Independent pules. It is rarely necessary to have recourse to violence, the Wak'hutu, believing their tyrants to be emissaries, as they represent themselves, from his High- ness the Sultan, and the chief nobles of Zanzibar, offer none but the most passive resistance, hiding their families and herds in the bush. Thus it • The Lake Regions of Central Africa, a Picture of Exploration. By Richard F. Burton, Capt. 8.11.1. Army.. Fellow and Cold Medallist of the Royal Geogr.. phieal Society. In two mAnnum Published by Longman and Ca.
happens that towards the end of the year nothing but a little grain can be purchased in a land of maryelloua fertility. . , . . The reader will readily ..reeive that he is upon the slave-path, so different from travel amongst the free and independent tribes of Southern Africa. The traffic practically an- nihilates every better feeling of human nature. Yet, though the state of the Wak'hutu appears pitiable, the traveller cannot practise pity : he is ever in the dilemma of maltreating or being maltreated. Were he to deal civilly and liberally ,with this people he would starve : it is vain to offer a priee for even the necessaries of life ; it would certainly be refused because more is wanted, and so on beyond the bounds of possibility. Thus, if the touter did not seize a house, he would never be allowed to take shelter in it from the storm ' • if be did not enforce a 'corvie,' he must labour beyond his strength with his own hands ; and if he did not fire a village and sell the villagers, he might die of hunger in the midst of plenty. Such in this pro- vince aro the action and reaction of the evil.
Quittiug that hot-bed of pestilence, Zungomero, the expedition arrived after a five hours' march at the verge of the mountains of Ksagara, constituting the second region, where strength and health ]eturned to them as if by magic, and they revelled in the pure sweet mountain air and the aspect of clear blue skies which lent their tints to highland ridges well wooded with various greens :—
" Pursuing our march on the next day, I witnessed a curious contrast in this strange African nature, which is ever in extremes, and where extremes ever meet, where grace andbeauty are seldom seen without a sudden change to a hideous grotesqueness. A splendid view charmed me in the morning. Above lay a sky of purest azure, flaked with fleecy opal-tinted vapours float- ing high in the empyrean, and catching the first roseate smiles of the un- risen sum. Long lines, one bluer than the other, broken by castellated crags and towers of most picturesque form, girdled the far horizon ; the seam heights were of a purplish-brown, and snowy mists hung like gla- ciers about their folds. The plain was a park in autumn, burnt tawny by the sun, patched with a darker hue where the people were firing the grass— a party was at work merrily, as if preparing for an English harvest-home- .te start the animals, to promote the growth of a young crop, and., such is the popular belief, to attract rain. Calabashes, Palmyras, Tamarinds, and clumps'of evergreen trees were spattered over the scene, each stretching its lordly arras over subject circlets of deep dew-fed verdure. Here the dove Aimed fondly, and the guinea-fowl rang its wild cry, whilst the peewit chat- tered in the open stubble, and a little martin, the prettiest of its kind, con- Amsted by its nimble dartings along the ground with the condor wheeling filoiirly through the upper air. The most graceful of animals, the zebra and the antelope, browsed in the distance : now they stood to gaze upon the long line-of porters, then, after leisurely pacing, with retrospective glances, in an -opposite direction, they halted motionless for a moment, faced about once 3arre to satiate curiosity, and lastly, terrified by their own fancy, they bounded in ricochets over the plain. "'About noon the fair scene vanished as if by enchantment. We suddenly turned northwards into a tangled mass of tall fetid reeds, rank jungle and farad, with its decaying trunks encroaching upon the hole-pierced goat- tut& that zigzaged towards the Myombo River. * * * * After the fiery sun and the dry atmosphere of the plains, the sudden effect of the dank and clammy chill, the result of exceeding evaporation, under the impervious shades that line the river banks, was overpowering. In such places one feels as if poisoned by miasma ; a shudder runs through the frame ; and a cold perspiration, like the prelede for a fainting-fit, breaks from the brow. Un- loading the asses, and fording the stream, we ascended the left bank, and occupied a kraal, with fires still smoking, on its summit. Though another porter was left behind with small-pox, I had little difficulty with the lug- age on this march : the more I worked the men, the harder they worked. Besides, they seldom fell sick on the road, though often prostrated when halting, a phenomenon which my companion explained by their hard eating and little exercise when stationary, and which Said bin Salim more merci- fully attributed to the fatigue and exposure of the journey taking effect when the excitement had passed away."
Seventeen days' marching through this highland region brought them to the foot of the first gradient of the terrible Rubeho Pass, where " trembling with ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, and limbs that would hardly support us, we eontemplated with a dogged. despair the apparently perpendi- molar path that ignored a zigzag, and the ladders of root and boulder, hemmed in with tangled vegetation up which we and our starving drooping asses were about to toil." The ascent was ac- complished in about six hours, and a second step, as steep but shorter than the Pass Terrible led them to the Little Rubeho, the summit of the third and westernmost range of the 1Jsagara Moun- tains, raised 5700 feet above the sea-level. At its foot lies Ugogo, which gives name to the third region, an arid plateau extending in breadth 100 miles. It is a "no man's land," peopled by a mon- grel race, and infested by four sultans, greedy exacters of black mail. The unfriends of the expedition at Zanzibar had prophe- sied that it would never pass Ugogo, and it was only by a nice ehanee that the prediction was not verified, for malevolent reports had been spread to the effect that the white men were magicians who would work all sorts of mischief upon the country, and next year return and seize it. "Fortunately for the expedition, seve- ral scions of the race saw the light safely during our transit of Ugogo : had an sccide.nt occurred to a few babies or calves, our return through the country would have been difficult and dan- gerous."
The fourth region traversed by the Expedition was Unyamwezi, the garden of Central Intertropical Africa which Captain Burton identifies with the far-famed " Land of the Moon." Native tra- dition, corroborated by the concurrent 'testimony of African travellers in the 17th century, declares that it was formerly the seat of a great empire united under a single despot. It is now broken up into petty divisions each ruled by its awn tyrant, whose authority never extends beyond five marches. When near
the Western limit of this region Captain Burton was struck with paralysis, from the effects of which he did not wholly recover for
more than a year. But he was not the man to be stopped by any- thing short of death from the completion of his work, and in ten days after the attack he again bestrode his ass. He now entered upon the fifth and last region, the trough of the Great Central De- pression the existence of which, like that of the gold deposits in Australia, was first surmised by Sir Roderick Murchison, and was indicated in his Address of 1852 to the Geographical Society. On the 13th of February, 1858, seven months and seventeen days after his departure from the coast, Captain Burton looked down from the summit of a steep and stony hill on Lake Tanganyika, the "Sea of Ujiji."
" What is that streak of light which lies below ?' I inquired of Seedy Bombay. I am of opinion,' quoth Bombay, that that is the water.' I gazed in dismay ; the remains of my blindness, the veil of trees, and a broad ray of sunshine illuminating but one reach of the Lake, had shrunk its fair proportions. Somewhat prematurely I began to lament my folly in having risked life and lost health for so poor a prize, to curse Arab crag- genttion, and to propose an immediate return, with a view of exploring the Nyanza, or Northern Lake. Advancing, however, a few yards, the whole scene suddenly burst upon my view, filling me with admiration' wonder,
and delight Nothing, in sooth, could be more picturesque than this first view of the Tanganyika Lake, as it lay in the lap of the mountains, basking in the gorgeous tropical sunshine Truly, it was a revel for soul and sight ! Forgetting toils, dangers, and the doubtfulness of return, I felt willing to endure double what I had endured ; and all the party seemed to join with me in joy."
Ujiji, on the Eastern shore of the Lake, where the Expedition fixed its head-quarters, is the great mart for slaves and ivory. The price of the human commodity varies *widely, but within such limits that the trade in it realizes nearly 500 per cent at Zanzibar. The shores of the lake were explored as far as practicable ; a considerable portion of them was laid down on the map from ac- tual survey, and the rest approximately from information Care- fully collected from the Native traders. This being done, the Expedition retraced its steps to the coast. The return journey was, like the advance, full of toil, suffering, and distracting cares ; but its leader was now armed with an inward talisman against all fortuitous troubles. Well is he entitled to say "I felt the proud consciousness of having done my best, under conditions from beginning to end the worst and the most unpromising, and that whatever future evils Fate might have in store for me, it could not rob me of the meed won by the hardships and sufferings of the past." But something more than the " superbia qutesita meritis" is due to the doer of such great things, to the possessor of such ad- mirable acquirements and faculties as meet, in rare combination, in the person of Captain Burton. Among the readers of his in- teresting and brilliant book there will be few, we imagine, who will not revert with pain and wonder to the first paragraph of his preface, in which he apologizes for delayed publication on the grounds of "the impaired health, the depression of spirits, and worse still the annoyance of official correspondence, which to me hare been the sok results of African Exploration." Can it be a matter of much difficulty to provide a suitable reward for a man to whom no reward would be so welcome as one which should in- volve opportunities for promoting the honour and advantage of his country by services which he is preeminently qualified to render ?
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